Stop Trying to Be Cool
Over three decades serving as a pastor I have had opportunity to witness many trends and fads in church life. Terms like “seeker” and “emergent” and “missional” and “relevant” and “contemporary” have all at various times found their way into the evangelical lexicon. While these cover a wide range of issues and involve many different personalities, they all grapple with a perennial matter namely: How does the church relate to the culture? Every Christian who desires to be faithful to the Lord must deal with the question: How can I/we engage the world without being worldly? Engaging the world is necessary because we are Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20) but avoiding worldliness is necessary because we are God’s holy people (Ephesians 1:1). Consider John’s command:
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
While this is a large topic with many facets, two principles will help us serve simultaneously as both the Lord’s representatives and His saints.
Know Your Audience, But Don’t Placate It
A key principle of good communication is to know with whom you’re speaking or to whom you’re writing. Doing so ensures your audience will understand your message. But it’s an ever-present temptation to move from a desire for understanding to a yearning for acceptance. “Contextualization,” (i.e., knowing your audience) which we should employ to ensure our message is intelligible has instead become an effort to make it palatable.
The quest to go from clarity to popularity has pressed scriptural passages into service beyond their actual meaning. The encounter between Paul and the Athenian philosophers at Mar’s Hill (Acts 17:16-34) was not (as often claimed), an example of cultural contextualization to win the audience. Instead, Paul readily recognized the Athenians practice of “talking about and listening to the latest ideas” (v. 21) as an expression of fallen values, exalting the mind of man while rejecting general revelation (“God made the world” [v. 24], and you [“In him we live and move and have our being” – v. 28a], and you know it [“Some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’” – v. 28b]. The very form they used was an affront to truth, so Paul was there not to join their dialogue but to offer his “proclamation” (v. 23). Therefore, we should be careful that the very forms we choose for preaching and presenting God’s truth emphasize authoritative proclamation rather than cultural dialogue, lest we slip into worldly forms of gospel communication.1
Serve Your Audience, But Don’t Emulate It
The gospel itself presents inherent and necessary obstacles to the unbeliever (1 Cor 1:18), but the apostle Paul teaches that we should avoid being any sort of personal barrier. However, many have misunderstood his words in 1 Corinthians 9 to mean we are to attract people to Christ by cultural contextualization. It is too common for Paul’s words in 1 Cor 9:22, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some,” to end up misinterpreted as advocating an attractional model of ministry. However, Makujina has it right when he describes what Paul is addressing in 1 Cor 9:
In 9:4–12 he explains to the Corinthians that even though he is in a position to expect material support from them, he would rather deprive himself of the right than hinder the gospel through its use. From this specific example Paul moves on in 9:19–23 to outline his overall policy regarding societal adaptation for evangelism. Contextually, then, what Paul meant by becoming “all things to all men” was doing all things possible to avoid certain prohibitions, strictures, and offenses peculiar to a culture. Paul had in mind such things as social and religious customs (1 Corinthians 10:31–33), the violation of which could insult its adherents and make it difficult to preach the gospel. ((Measuring the Music, 37–38, fn. 13.))
In other words, Paul was not seeking to be an attraction, but rather to keep from becoming a distraction. Likewise, our presentation of the gospel should be such that we avoid preemptory rejection of a hearing by doing anything that unnecessarily erects walls between us and our hearers. Yet Paul understood the temptation to play to the crowd and tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. And so, he warned his young protégé, Timothy, that it’s quite possible to receive wide approval from man and yet definite disapproval from God:
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. (2 Timothy 4:1-3)
God’s message made clear never wins acceptance naturally, and sometimes the messenger is not accepted either. The sooner Christians and the Church accept this, the better. If they’re bored by the teaching of the Bible, the problem is not the Word of God. If they’re put off by the distinctive life and stand of God’s holy people, the problem is not with Christians. And if both of those are to change it will not be because you and your church and your pastor finally learned how to be relevant. Apart from the Spirit of God working on the heart of man when we proclaim the Word of God, our audience will always reject it. So, church, Christian, preacher: Stop trying to be cool.
Ken Brown is the pastor of Community Bible Church in Trenton, MI. We republish his article by permission.
Photo by Collin Armstrong on Unsplash
- For an excellent exposition of Acts 17, see Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith (Atlanta, GA: American Vision, 1996), 235–274. [↩]